Thursday, 5 April 2018

OSKAR STRELITS

OSKAR
STRELITS (1892-1937)

He was born in Kovno.In his youth he left home and worked in a
paper business and as a porter.He read
and studied on his own a great deal.For
revolutionary work, he spent time in prison in Lithuania.After being freed, he left Lithuania and
moved to Moscow, where he studied in the workers’ faculty of the state
university.At the same time he was a
contributor to editorial board of the newspaper Emes (Truth).He was
considered one of the most prominent authors of human-interest pieces in Soviet
Yiddish literature.When the first ethnic
Jewish district was set up in Kalinindorf in the late 1920s, he moved there
from Moscow, and organized the production of the local newspaper Kolvirt-emes (Collective farm truth).From his own work and his observations of
events and personalities in the Jewish villages, he published a collection of
notes entitled Der bolshevistisher
friling, fartseykhenungen fun kalinindorfer rayon, friling 1930 (Bolshevik
spring, notes from Kalinindorf district, spring 1930) (Moscow: Emes, 1930), 149
pp.He then returned to Moscow and
worked for Emes.In 1932 he brought out a collection of
vignettes: Aropgerisene maskes, felyetonen
(Masks torn off, feature pieces), foreword by M. Litvakov (Moscow: Emes, 1932),
144 pp.And, one year later: Rekonstruktsye, fartseykhenungen
(Reconstruction, notes) (Moscow: Emes, 1933), 210 pp.—based on his travels
through the cities and towns and his meetings with people: déclassé elements,
factory workers, farmers, and scholars.From
Russian he translated into Yiddish: Mikhail Sholokhov, Oyfgeakerte royerd (Virgin soil upturned [original title: Podnyataya
Tselina]) (Moscow: Emes, 1937), 423 pp.; and Geografye,lernbukh farn dritn klas fun der onfang-shul (Geography, textbook
for the third year of primary school) by Lidiia G. Terekhova and V. G. Erdeli
(Moscow: Emes, 1937), fifth printing.He
also place worked in the anthologies: Far der bine: dertseylungen, pyeses, lider (For the stage: stories, plays, poems), with
musical notation (edited by Y. Dobrushin, B. Olevski, and E. Gordon) (Moscow,
1929); Der veg fun farat,kamf kegn bundizm un menshevizm in der yidisher
proletarisher literatur (The way of betrayal, the struggle against
Bundism and Menshevism in Jewish proletarian literature), edited by A.
Kushnirov and Y. Rabin (Moscow, 1932); Deklamator fun der sovetisher yidisher literatur (Declaimer of Soviet Yiddish
literature) (Moscow, 1934).He also
published in the Kharkov journal Prolit
(Proletarian literature).He was a
co-editor of Der apikoyres (The
heretic), “organ of the central council of fighting heretics” (Moscow, 1933).He was a victim of the Stalinist repression, arrested
in 1937 and killed in a concentration camp.